Posted tagged ‘sisters’

I was – am – a doll person. Not baby dolls so much but dolls. The first one I have memories of is a blonde, blue eyed Patty Play Pal doll. I got her for Christmas when I was five. She was as big as I was and could wear my clothes. There were others. Chatty Cathy. Tressy. A Shirley Temple doll whose curls were matted beyond relief and so I cut them off. She looked cuter with that shorter, more manageable bob….I thought. I still get occasional flak for ‘Little Miss No Name.’

She had huge brown eyes and lanky blonde hair. She wore a burlap dress, no shoes and had a plastic tear that could be removed from her cheek. She came in VERY handy when I would play ‘lost in the Siberian wilderness.’ Okay…so I was a history nut and a very weird child. And the doll’s flat, out stretched palm made her a perfect complement to our neighborhood ‘spook houses’ in the garage. A Barbie doll head and a puddle of ketchup on that palm was totally gross out material.

While I still have a trunk full of hand made porcelain dolls and a couple of AG dolls I have had for years, I have not been able to transfer the doll love to my daughter. Dolls freak her out because they stare at her. Always have. Heh.

We DID get into the doll house thing for a while though. Her big gift for her first Christmas with us was a Fisher Price Loving Family doll house. We had it wrapped up and under the tree for about two weeks before Christmas. Her favorite part of our days at home alone were dragging that box out, opening the gift, setting up the doll house and playing with it, wrapping it up again and putting it back under the tree before Daddy got home. Shhh. He still doesn’t understand how she understood where all of the pieces went when she opened it on Christmas morning. : )

My niece was – is – a doll lover. She is in college now and has grown up several states away so our times together were pretty infrequent. There was a shopping trip once when she was about three. I remember a little bitty Libby standing up in the cart as we searched through a toy department killing time while her parents shopped. We were looking through the ‘new’ Cabbage Patch doll collection and picked up one with the name ‘Libby Kitty’ on it’s adoption certificate My husband and I looked at one another and then just grinned. How could we resist? We slipped the box on the shelf under the cart – secretly we thought – and went on with our shopping. My sister walked up, saw the box and asked ‘Whose Cabbage Patch is that?” Without missing a beat, little bitty Libby looked up from the shopping cart and said, ‘It’s mine!’ And it was…..her constant companion for a great many years after. LOL

Prince was into Brio trains, Playmobile communities and…..Star Wars. He was 2 and a half when he wrapped his fingers around his first Luke Skywalker action figure and he never let go of it. Never. He also loved stuffed animals. When he turned three, ‘Tickle Me Elmo’ was all the rage. With a February birthdate we were able to by pass the scarcity of it at Christmas and give it to him then. Someone had told me to save my mylar balloons and use them for spectacular shiny wrapping paper and I did. When he woke up on his birthday, Prince had a small pile of silvery presents in the middle of the livingroom floor. He was so excited that he accidentally stepped on one. To his absolute delight, the package starting cackling and then skittered across the carpeting as ‘Tickle Me Elmo’ vibrated inside. We had so much fun with that that he almost didn’t want to unwrap it!

My sister did not grow up a doll lover. She was more into Hot Wheels and Tonka trucks. She did own a pair of twin baby dolls that I was jealous of – Karen and Kenny. They came with their very own – very cool – double stroller and matching outfits. I had her SO convinced that I could look at a doll and ‘know’ their name. She hated the names ‘Karen and Kenny’ but she could never call them anything else. Made her furious! She also had the entire set of Johnny West dolls. She had Johnny, Jane, Jay, Josie, Jamie, Janice, Geronimo, a couple of horses and all of their gear. They were her most prized possessions. Until junior high. In a spate of ‘maturity’ she gave the entire box to the little sister of a friend and has regretted it ever since.

My sister had another toy that she held very dear to her heart.

Thimble City.

You may have seen one or something like it. It was a cardboard ‘city’ mounted on short legs. It had tiny cars and people that could be moved around with long sticks that had magnets on them. You maneuvered items by sliding the magnet sticks under the ‘streets’ of the city.

Gosh…she loved that thing. She would play with it for hours.

It was kept in its box under our trundle bed in our bedroom. We thought it was a safe place. The box was big and bulky. Sometimes it didn’t quite make it completely under the bed. A corner would stick out. And one night when I was about 10 and she was six, I sat up in bed and lost my cookies.

Seriously.

All over the bed. All over the floor and….unfortunately….inside the sticking out corner of the open box of her Thimble City.

I still remember being in a flu fugue and seeing my mother holding my panicking little sister in her lap, trying to divert her attention, as my dad carried the sloppy, stinky box from under our bed to the trash can.

It was a very sad day. For all of us.

But especially me.

Because ever since that day, whenever we’d get into a fight or an argument in which disappointments were bantered back and forth, the argument would always….ALWAYS….end with….

I am so not good at keeping secrets. But this Christmas I totally out did myself. At last I can share the details behind two very special gifts that were made possible by two very special friends.

D and I have been email/web board/FB buddies for about three years now (or is it four?) Our friendship began with a mutual interest in ‘ER’…and Maura Tierney’s work. She has been a god send in being a totally non-involved friend that cares. Someone to grouse to. Someone to share things with. Someone to have dinner with and go to a play with in NYC a year ago. I remember thinking that our first face to face meeting was going to either make or break our friendship. But it was like we had been friends forever. Seriously.

When the Prince received his varsity letter for soccer in November, we told him that he would have to wait until his February birthday for his jacket. The going rate for such a jacket was in the $300 to $400 dollar range. We were looking at a trip to Florida to visit my parents after all. And he was okay with that. But D wasn’t. She wanted him to have it for Christmas. Well, actually SHE wanted him to have it for Thanksgiving! Thanks to her husband’s line of work and a few phone calls to the local pro shops that provide these things, a jacket arrived in my school mail in November. Free of charge. A gift from a friend. All we had to do was get the letter and the patch and the soccer ball and words stitched in place. And all the while we kept telling him that a varsity jacket was not possible until February so what would he like instead? Imagine his surprise….

My sister and I have been fans of Ree Drummond’s web site for several years now. She is an Oklahoma cooking, homeschooling, ranching wife, mom of four who writes www.thepioneerwoman.com. She has been working on her cookbook for a while now. It came out in late October and she has been doing the ‘Griswold Book Tour’ thing for months. She didn’t make it anywhere closer to my state than Chicago. So, in September, I cooked up this diabotical plan to have a friend in Oklahoma stand in line – in late October – to get an autographed copy as a Christmas gift for my sister. Unbeknownst to me I was taking my friend (and one of her friends) TOTALLY out of her comfort zone to do this. And neither of us had ANY idea that she would be standing in line for over six hours with 500 other people to meet someone who was getting a freaking ‘Christmas list from everyone she talked to!’ But she did it for me. Because she knows how much I love my sister. The really funny thing is that about a week after I had made the arrangements for C to do this for me, my sister emailed me and told me NOT to buy the cookbook because she was getting it for me for Christmas. I told her that I only wanted an autographed copy.

And I stood my ground about that. Hee hee. She was so worried about my gift. In fact, she almost autographed it herself! It was fun to have her open her own copy….to find the autograph (“Are you KIDDING me?!”) and a Christmas card from C…as well as a copy of the email outlining the evening C had spent bringing my diabotical plan to fruitation.

Oh there were a few other neat things. My dad looks forward to the book I select for him every year (Ernie Harwell’s Biography) and the Princess got clothes and a new snowboarding jacket and enough money from enough directions to get the same i-pod thingy that her brother had sprung for. The hospital had WiFi and things were awfully quiet when they had their thumbs going. And the doctors were bringing my mother out of her sedated state very slowly. Her surgery to remove the infection was sucessful and she had color in her face again. All in all, a great Christmas Day!

All About Me…..sorta

I am a Christian, Wife, Mother, Sister, Daughter, Stepmom and Teacher. My two internationally adopted All American kiddos are adults now but dragged me kicking and screaming into 'Soccer Momhood.' I miss it. I almost always have a novel in progress on my laptop. I abhorr housework and avoid it at all costs. Except for folding clothes. Somehow that relaxes me.
Go figure.....